A number of systems and programs are offered on the market for the design, the engineering and the manufacturing of objects. CAD is an acronym for Computer-Aided Design, e.g. it relates to software solutions for designing an object. CAE is an acronym for Computer-Aided Engineering, e.g. it relates to software solutions for simulating the physical behavior of a future product. CAM is an acronym for Computer-Aided Manufacturing, e.g. it relates to software solutions for defining manufacturing processes and operations. In such computer-aided design systems, the graphical user interface plays an important role as regards the efficiency of the technique. These techniques may be embedded within Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems. PLM refers to a business strategy that helps companies to share product data, apply common processes, and leverage corporate knowledge for the development of products from conception to the end of their life, across the concept of extended enterprise. The PLM solutions provided by Dassault Systèmes (under the trademarks CATIA, ENOVIA and DELMIA) provide an Engineering Hub, which organizes product engineering knowledge, a Manufacturing Hub, which manages manufacturing engineering knowledge, and an Enterprise Hub which enables enterprise integrations and connections into both the Engineering and Manufacturing Hubs. All together the system delivers an open object model linking products, processes, resources to enable dynamic, knowledge-based product creation and decision support that drives optimized product definition, manufacturing preparation, production and service.
In this context, some solutions allow the design of composite parts, as these are mechanical parts more and more at use in many industries. However, existing solutions are not fully satisfactory. Notably, some solutions provide an approximate representation of the composite part, but not accurate enough for the manufacturing end to use it as such, or even for simulations performed on such a representation to be relevant enough. Other solutions provide general tools for local designs, that can be theoretically used for composite material design as well. Such solutions can be used to repair non-accurate designs of composite parts, or even design such composite parts from scratch, but they require many user interventions and are thus too inefficient from the point of view of ergonomics.
Within this context, there is still a need for an improved solution for designing an outer surface of a composite part.